Praise, when you are not being you, can not make you feel better about yourself.

You appear more charismatic, courageous and authentic to others when you share your true self.

You admire authenticity in others, so why wouldn’t others admire the authenticity in you?

Authenticity is having the courage to live in alignment to your true self.

Even if it means being judged by another.

3. The practice of failing forward.

We all make mistakes. And mistakes often lead to despair, feelings of failure and giving up.

Yet mistakes are not only OK, they are essential for your personal growth and development.

This practice requires you to stop saying, “I am a failure because of my mistakes”, and to start saying, “I am grateful for my mistakes, because I have learnt and grown from them”.

Failing forward is trusting your past has been exactly right for you.

Even if you think that you have failed.

4. The practice of worthiness.

We’re surrounded with images of “perfect” bodies, millionaire celebrities and people living in fancy houses or going on luxurious holidays. Constantly comparing can leave us feeling inadequate, especially if we perceive their position as unattainable.

When you next compare, it is important to remember:

Comparison is a game you (and every single other person!) can never win. Everyone can find someone who appears more successful, attractive or intelligent if they look.

The images you see never tell the whole story. For example, that person with the expensive new house may also work 12 hours a day, and sacrificed their health, relationships and happiness for it.

No comparison is ever valid, as that person is on a different journey with different experiences, opportunities and genetics to you.

Worthiness is affirming your self-worth can never be diminished by somebody else.

Even somebody who appears to have it much better than you do.

5. The practice of embracing all of you.

There are so many things that make you the unique person that you are.

But whenever you become fixated on just one, your self-acceptance becomes highly fragile.

Some examples:

A leading executive attached to this identity struggles with self-acceptance after their redundancy.

A model attached to this identity struggles with self-acceptance as they grow old.

A housewife (or househusband) attached to this identity struggles with self-acceptance when their partner leaves them.

We play many different roles in life (a son, a brother, a friend, a pet-owner, an amateur chef, a soccer player, a blog writer, …), and each of them contributes to our growth and fulfilment.

Embracing all of you is loving all of the qualities that lie within you.

Even when you feel pressured to focus on just one.

6. The practice of being the creator.

The final practice is knowing that you are responsible for the life that you are living right now.

It is understanding:

You are the sum of your choices, and

If you are unhappy with where you are today, you can go and change that by making a new choice.

Being the creator is feeling empowered that you can create your world to be an even better one.

Instead of learning about the right and wrong foods to eat, let’s learn instead about the many different foods and diets each compatible with healthy living.

Instead of learning to change what we eat according to a new diet, let’s learn instead to modify what we eat according to our internal hunger.

Instead of learning to stop eating the foods we love, let’s learn instead to eat them in the amounts that provide us with long-term enjoyment and satisfaction.

Instead of learning to eat by following all of these rules and restrictions, let’s learn instead how to eat with freedom and by following our intuition.

Instead of learning that eating is a practice done primarily to lose weight, let’s learn instead that it is a practice done primarily to nourish the billions of cells that contribute to the optimal functioning of our mind and body.

Relearning food and nutrition matters.

It matters because eating within the context of diets, judgements, rules and restrictions is highly stressful. This stress is not just damaging short-term, it too has long-term impacts on our hormonal, neurological and digestive systems.

When we approach food and nutrition with a different mindset, we can help to undo these physiological effects. Research shows that eating more mindfully and with self-compassion – being aware and attentive to our eating, without judgement – promotes healthy weight management.

Indeed, our eating mindset is proposed as a better predictor of weight management than any specific combination of foods or nutrients is.

The most common question I get asked as a nutritionist is, “Is this food healthy?”

Once we get that pay rise, have that house, lose those 5kg or win that award, we celebrate, but are soon right back to where we started. We just go looking for the very next thing that needs to be ticked off from our list.

The truth is, long-term happiness isn’t found from the outside.

It comes from how we view and interact with the world, not about what the world gives back to us. Scientific research suggests just 10% of our total long-term happiness is influenced by our life circumstances.

When we instead practice the art of embracing the strengths that we have today, cultivating the relationships that mean the most to us now, contributing to something greater than ourselves and having gratitude for what we have already got, we give up our search for happiness by looking into the future.